Fast Food Chain Secures Brand Reputation at Point of Sale

In a recent consumer survey, 23 percent of respondents said they prefer paying for fast food with credit cards. That translates to many tens of millions of credit card transactions each day, which makes the point-of-sale (POS) systems of fast-food restaurants a great target for cyberthreat actors.

After a significant credit card security breach in the POS system of a large fast-food chain was discovered, a SecureWorks client in that same industry decided it should take steps to upgrade and harden the security of its upgraded POS systems used by its franchisees worldwide.

Good thing it did. The SecureWorks consultant was able to compromise all systems in the POS network, including access to plain-text cardholder data. The consultant found weak and shared passwords being used, which offers easy network access to threat actors. In addition, the consultant was able to pull credit card data from the POS test system’s remote access memory and implant malware to capture credit card information.

Had the company launched the upgraded POS system network without SecureWorks penetration testing uncovering its many security gaps, the rollout could have been a potential disaster.